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Enjoy the silence

From European Voice's Entre-Nous column

3/7/12, 9:06 PM CET

Updated 4/23/14, 9:15 PM CET

A meeting of the Eurogroup, and then nothing!

There was no press conference after the last meeting of the Eurogroup – the finance ministers of the eurozone – on 1 March. Usually, Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime minister, who chairs meetings of the Eurogroup, and Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs and the euro, convey their post-match verdicts to unimpressed and unconvinced journalists. Last Thursday, Juncker contented himself with putting out a statement.

The problem was that the finance ministers met just before the European Council that same day. So instead of gathering in the Council’s headquarters building, Justus Lipsius, they met in the Lex building next door – usually home to the translators and lawyer-linguists – which is not set up for press conferences.

EU sources said that it would anyway have been inappropriate for Juncker to brief the media before he had informed his fellow members of the European Council about the outcome of the meeting.

And there was another issue of protocol that militated against a eurozone press conference. Even though Rehn was recently promoted to be a vice-president of the European Commission, he is not a member of the European Council and so not allowed into the summit’s inner security zone.

Juncker is stepping down as chairman of the Eurogroup in June and Rehn is a candidate to take over. If he does get the chairmanship, perhaps he can apply for a security upgrade.